Biography Frank Richards

Richards was born in Birmingham where he studied at the School of Art.
He was elected a member of the Birmingham Society of Artists in 1884,
when he was just twenty one. Having travelled throughout Europe,
Richards was captivated by the immediacy and honesty of plein air
painting. Back in England, it soon became apparent that the newly
established group of artists at Newlyn were similarly inspired and so he
joined Stanhope Forbes in Cornwall. Richards would have already known
the Birmingham-born artists Edwin Harris and Walter Langley who had
settled in the small village and he became a regular visitor to Cornwall
between 1892 and 1897, despite his dislike of Newlyn as `a filthy and
smelly and somewhat lazy place`.